If you’re looking for a guy who understands the potential for Silicon Valley to lead the way in creating good jobs in the United States, you could do a lot worse than Bill Davidow.

Davidow, who co-founded Mohr Davidow, has been in the valley venture capital game for nearly 30 years. He’s partly responsible for launching dozens of companies that provided thousands of jobs. He’s heard, of course, the talk about the need to jump-start job creation and how many in Washington, D.C., are looking to Silicon Valley and its startup culture to get things going. Which is why his take on that likelihood is so significant and discouraging.

“We are creating great opportunities again, but the thing that concerns me is that we don’t have trickle-down anymore,” Davidow said recently. “We used to create a job at the top and we’d create 10 jobs at the bottom. I worry that technology no longer has the leverage on the economy to pull the United States out of its problem.”

Davidow was something of a buzz kill recently on a panel of “Silicon Valley Legends” convened as part of the GIL 2011: Silicon Valley conference in San Jose. His fellow legends — microprocessor pioneer and Zilog founder Federico Faggin, venture capitalist Dick Kramlich and former VeriSign CEO and venture capitalist Stanton Sclavos — had been talking about the valley’s resiliency in the face of economic hard times. You’ve heard the spiel: entrepreneurs are irrepressible, failure incubates success, each slowdown is followed by a new wave of innovation.

Davidow didn’t disagree, but he insightfully pointed out that the valley is a land of two economies: Those in jobs at the top are doing well, spectacularly well, in fact. But the middle class and the poor are being crushed. The truth is, the fortunes of the fortunate and the rest have become disconnected.

“Corporate America is doing well because we are capitalizing on world opportunities, and by capitalizing on world opportunities now an American corporation can prosper and do tremendously well,” Davidow continued. “That doesn’t necessarily pull the country up and create prosperity across the country.”

The biggest reason for the disconnect, Davidow argued, is the loss of manufacturing. The valley, and the country at large, don’t make things anymore. We produce ideas and code — and jobs that end up in India, China and other foreign lands.

Add to all that, says Sclavos, the fact that the lean startup movement means that when enterprises are launched in Silicon Valley it takes far fewer people to do the work. Teams are smaller. The cloud and communication mean fewer of them need to be based in the valley.

“In fact,” he said, “much of what we’re funding are these things that are so capital-efficient and can generate a critical mass of users so quickly that what used to take $50 million takes five and what used to take five really only takes $500,000.”

And so what to do?

I asked Davidow after the formal discussion. Yes, he brought up the business world’s mantra: Tax policy and regulation have driven manufacturing out of California and the United States.

“I have to follow environmental laws and provide health insurance and I have to compete with places that don’t,” he says. But to his credit, he was not advocating a race to the bottom. Like me, he appeared unwilling to accept China’s water and air quality, wages and working conditions for a more vibrant manufacturing sector.

Still, Davidow said, we either have to impose the same restrictions overseas (through trade agreements) or lift them here. The former strikes me as easier said than done and the latter as unwise. But as we talked, Davidow made a bigger point that might be the most important thing we can do to begin to turn around the tragedy of unemployment.

Whatever your political view — anti-tax, anti-regulation or pro-leveling the playing field by bringing everyone’s living standard up — it’s time we all start facing the fact that we need to make some hard choices if we want manufacturing jobs to rebound.

“I’d be anxious for people to debate the issues and face the facts,” Davidow told me. “I think if you did, you’d have a lot more moderate Democrats and a lot more moderate Republicans.”

And maybe members of both parties could begin to put the needs of the country — and particularly those who are suffering in the country — before politics.

It may be too much to ask in these politically polarized times. But thank goodness there are people like Bill Davidow who are at least doing the asking.

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